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- May 30, 2003
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Come and See
Klimov (1985)
A Belarusian village in the midst of WW2. A brief peace is shattered by the arrival of the Germans, sending a young boy off on an Odyssey-like excursion of horror through the war-torn countryside. He endures a deafening shelling in the woods. In the meantime his family is taken away. He traverses a bog that seems almost out of a dark fairy tale. He meets new people. A girl. A group of rebels searching for supplies. An argument ends when one participant steps on a landmine. A nighttime shooting across an open field seems almost sci-fi with laser-like tracers and sounds that claim not just more men, but a poor cow with the bad luck of merely existing. I suppose that applies to most here. In a film loaded with horrifying sequences, the worst might be the prolonged taking of the village as people are herded into a wooden barn. We know why. They don’t seem to. It takes an excruciating amount of time for the Germans to enact their endgame of locking them in and burning it to the ground. The tables will turn a little time and a few miles down the road later and the people will get their revenge, small comfort it is. As the narrative wraps, the movie moves into a mad fantasy of real newsreels running backwards in time, as if it can undo what has been done. The epilogue notes that 628 Belarusian villages were burned to the ground during the war.
Francois Truffaut famously opined that you can’t make an anti-war movie because all movies ultimately end up glorifying war. I’ve seen and heard this sentiment applied multiple times lately — reviews of 1917, a podcast series I’ve been listening to that discussed this issue regarding Platoon, The Deer Hunter, Saving Private Ryan and Apocalypse Now. I wonder what he’d think about Come and See. Though I think there’s some truth in his idea, this feels like it would be one of the exceptions. It’s hard to sit through any minute of this or to recall it afterward and think there is a moment that even unintentionally glorifies such destruction. (Full disclosure, I was thinking about this on my own, but in doing some supplemental reading after writing most of my review, I came across Roger Ebert who opened with the same pondering. I suppose asking this question about war movies itself at this point is now a cliche).
Klimov’s approach is episodic and at times surreal. As mentioned above, the bog, the dense fog, the laser-like bullets. There’s a monkey. There are all too brief respites of good too. The forest rainbow and soothing drops of rain. It feels more like a nightmarish fairy tale at parts. And that’s fitting. I think of other war movies and I think of the cliches like the kindly village woman usually with a kid (hello 1917!) or the few moments of detente between a pair of combatants on opposing sides. This doesn’t have any of that. The weird touches, oddly, make it feel more real to me than the tropes we’re used to seeing. There’s lots of POV in this. Not only does the camera often act as the eyes, but characters often stare right back into it, right down the pipe, typically a no-no in movies, but it creates an unsettling effect here. That made me want to turn away as often as the depicted horrors did.
The visuals are plenty striking, but you can’t ignore the sound either. Raindrops, post-explosion ear ringing, forest creatures and bugs, screams, crackling flames. It's a sensory horror show.
Klimov (1985)
A Belarusian village in the midst of WW2. A brief peace is shattered by the arrival of the Germans, sending a young boy off on an Odyssey-like excursion of horror through the war-torn countryside. He endures a deafening shelling in the woods. In the meantime his family is taken away. He traverses a bog that seems almost out of a dark fairy tale. He meets new people. A girl. A group of rebels searching for supplies. An argument ends when one participant steps on a landmine. A nighttime shooting across an open field seems almost sci-fi with laser-like tracers and sounds that claim not just more men, but a poor cow with the bad luck of merely existing. I suppose that applies to most here. In a film loaded with horrifying sequences, the worst might be the prolonged taking of the village as people are herded into a wooden barn. We know why. They don’t seem to. It takes an excruciating amount of time for the Germans to enact their endgame of locking them in and burning it to the ground. The tables will turn a little time and a few miles down the road later and the people will get their revenge, small comfort it is. As the narrative wraps, the movie moves into a mad fantasy of real newsreels running backwards in time, as if it can undo what has been done. The epilogue notes that 628 Belarusian villages were burned to the ground during the war.
Francois Truffaut famously opined that you can’t make an anti-war movie because all movies ultimately end up glorifying war. I’ve seen and heard this sentiment applied multiple times lately — reviews of 1917, a podcast series I’ve been listening to that discussed this issue regarding Platoon, The Deer Hunter, Saving Private Ryan and Apocalypse Now. I wonder what he’d think about Come and See. Though I think there’s some truth in his idea, this feels like it would be one of the exceptions. It’s hard to sit through any minute of this or to recall it afterward and think there is a moment that even unintentionally glorifies such destruction. (Full disclosure, I was thinking about this on my own, but in doing some supplemental reading after writing most of my review, I came across Roger Ebert who opened with the same pondering. I suppose asking this question about war movies itself at this point is now a cliche).
Klimov’s approach is episodic and at times surreal. As mentioned above, the bog, the dense fog, the laser-like bullets. There’s a monkey. There are all too brief respites of good too. The forest rainbow and soothing drops of rain. It feels more like a nightmarish fairy tale at parts. And that’s fitting. I think of other war movies and I think of the cliches like the kindly village woman usually with a kid (hello 1917!) or the few moments of detente between a pair of combatants on opposing sides. This doesn’t have any of that. The weird touches, oddly, make it feel more real to me than the tropes we’re used to seeing. There’s lots of POV in this. Not only does the camera often act as the eyes, but characters often stare right back into it, right down the pipe, typically a no-no in movies, but it creates an unsettling effect here. That made me want to turn away as often as the depicted horrors did.
The visuals are plenty striking, but you can’t ignore the sound either. Raindrops, post-explosion ear ringing, forest creatures and bugs, screams, crackling flames. It's a sensory horror show.